Death Of A Great Idea

On May 18th HDGiants (formerly known as MusicGiants) filed for bankruptcy. By Friday only the CEO and a single support guy were left working there. Everyone else had been let go.

This is sad news for me. HDGiants was the only source for CD-quality (lossless) digital music. The future seemed even brighter when, late last year, they announced that they’d be dropping DRM protection in all of their music. In addition they’d been working towards providing Firefox support (the service only worked cleanly with Internet Explorer and MediaPlayer).

Now it seems the future will have to be traversed without them.

I reached out to the company several times during their tenure to try and let them know what was important to me and why I would sometimes hold off on purchases. In the latter cases it would always come down my not accepting annoying protected content when, supposedly unprotected no-hassle music was just around the corner.

Their concept was a real winner for people like me. For those not familiar, it worked just like iTunes except that their music was of the highest possible quality all for just $1.99 a track. That’s still slightly more than I hoped to pay, but acceptable. Paying $1 a track for crippled, limited quality music is not my idea of acceptable.